The Harry Palmer Quartet. Len Deighton

boat’s just leaving.”’

      The breakers bombarded the reef in thundering crashes that shook the sand beneath our feet.

      ‘It’s getting chilly,’ she said. ‘Let’s go back to the car.’

¹ The Soviet spy apparatus: ‘Committee on State Security’.

       21

      [Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) You may meet delays in private plans, but be circumspect. Your well-meaning efforts may well be misunderstood.]

      The next two days were nerve racking. Life on the atoll busied itself into a frenetic but organized scramble as the day for the explosion neared. As far as I could tell, my role as observer was uninterrupted, and my entrée to the dreariest possible conferences unfortunately unimpeded. Jean and I had few opportunities for more than a word or so without the risk of being overheard or recorded. Our decision to appear rather distant meant a chance of remaining unimplicated for her – but a feeling of sharpened desire in me that no man should feel for his secretary if he wants to stay in a position to fire her. I saw her waiting for signatures or documents in the long grey fibreboard corridors. While standing still, her smooth body would move – slowly and imperceptibly – under the thin summer uniform fabric, and I would think of the small circular gold ear-ring of hers that I had found in my bed-clothes on Wednesday morning.

      More times than I care to provide excuses for, I edged past her in narrow corridors and doorways. Electricity passing between us assuaged the deep aloneness I felt. My desire wasn’t a burgeoning pent-up explosive fullness, but a gentle vacant need. Fear brings an edge to physical desire sharper than a Toledo blade, and a pitch more plaintive than a Dolmetsch flute.

      I’d spent most of the two days working closely with Dalby. It was a pleasure. The difference between Dalby and the other people from the Intelligence units with his background was his readiness to use information from his inferiors – both socially and militarily speaking. He was prepared to let the technicians conclude opinions from their data, where others would try to understand the techniques in order to jealously guard the privilege of deciding anything at all.

      Jean and I had discovered the box in the blockhouse on Tuesday. On Thursday the General Commanding – General Y. O. Guerite, had invited all commissioned men and available girls to a party in his house.

      The General’s house backed on to one of the coves on the rocky side of the island. The sun made the tree trunks a pink that stampeded the gastric juices. Once more the sunset was a layer cake of mauve and gold. The insects had come out to do their daily battle with the resources of the American chemical industries, and through the trees an obliging Engineers Corps had remembered to provide lines of winking fairy lights. Large martinis clinked with ice and glowed with lemon and cherries. Small pasty-faced waiters walked heavily on their flat, perpetually aching feet, and looked ill at ease out of doors. Here and there well-built clean-cut figures, tanned and alert, moved briskly to distribute trays of drinks, and tried to look like the pasty-faced aching waiters whose white jackets they shared.

      Three army musicians moved coolly and mathematically within the modal range of ‘There’s a small Hotel’ and linking modulated inversions walked around the middle eight with creditable synchronization. Here and there a laugh walked up the foothills of noise.

      Beyond the lights at the far end of the General’s little garden, Dalby was sitting perched uncomfortably on a rock edge. Two or three feet below him the water moved quietly. Out at sea a grey destroyer sat at anchor, a trace of smoke demonstrating its ever-ready head of steam. On its sides, a huge white ‘R’ told me it was one of the ships used to measure force and radiation underwater by means of vast wire nets to which measuring equipment was attached. Upon a launch alongside, shiny black rubber-garbed frogmen climbed, explained, ordered, carried and descended, as they checked the net fittings on the hull.

      Dalby made circular motions with his glass of martini, swirling it into a thin layer of clear centrifugal controlled violence. He sipped a little of the undulating alcoholic surface and rubbed the glass edge on his lower lip.

      ‘There’s no way of contracting out,’ he was saying.

      I couldn’t help connecting his remark with myself, but he went on, ‘To do any sort of bargain with them is quite out of the question, merely because there is no guarantee that their word will be kept. The minute war becomes the better way to expound Communism, war will be begun by Communists. And make no mistake, they won’t be using kids’ stuff like this bomb. It will be area saturation with suitable nerve gases.’

      He looked across the imported and carefully laid out grass turf now crowded with summer-uniformed men and women. Between me and the big long tables of food a plump girl in white held the arms of two Marine Corps lieutenants, and all three heads bowed as her white pointed shoes nimbly followed the triple rhythms and superimposed discords of a cha cha cha.

      ‘Don’t make any mistake, Jimmy,’ Dalby was speaking directly to a staff-brigadier. ‘Where your military system has the direct support of commerce and industry, you are absolute world beaters. This whole atoll is an unrivalled feat: but it’s a feat of logistics and organization that you’ve had a lot of practice in. There is not much difference between creating, at a speed fast approaching the Biblical record, a Coca-Cola plant with a shooting gallery for employee recreation, and creating a shooting plant with a Coca-Cola gallery for recreation.’

      ‘So does it matter, Dalby?’ The Brigadier, a big-boned athlete of sixty or more, hair grey and one eighth of an inch long, spectacles with their fine gold frames glinting as the reflections of a hundred fairy lights ran across his eyes. ‘Who cares where the credit lies. If we can make the biggest damndest greatest bang no one is going to give a damn about details. They’re just going to stay well clear of Uncle Sam.’ Finding something lacking in the audience reaction, he hastily added, ‘And well clear of NATO too. The whole free world in fact.’

      ‘I don’t think that’s what Dalby means,’ I said. I was always explaining to people what other people meant. ‘He grants you the ability but is unsure if you will use it correctly.’

      ‘You’re going to give me the old “Europe: home of diplomacy” stuff, eh boy?’ The Brigadier turned his huge grey head to face me. ‘I thought Khrushchev tactics had brought you guys up to date on that stuff.’

      ‘No, merely that Europeans have a firm and fearful knowledge of what happens when diplomats fail,’ I told him.

      ‘Diplomats and surgeons never fail,’ said Dalby. ‘They have too strong a union ever to have to admit it.’

      I went on, ‘Americans are not noted for assuming failure to be possible before starting something.’

      ‘Oh heck, relationships between any rival business outfits are the same as between nations.’

      ‘I think that was true at one time, but now the destructive capabilities are such that, to extend your analogy, we must think in terms of cartels. Rivals must unite to live and let live.’

      ‘You Europeans always think in terms of cartels. That’s one of your worst failings. An American guy figures out how to make a ballpoint pen, he figures on selling them at a nickel a throw. In Europe when you first had speed-balls I saw them on sale nudging two English pounds! The difference is: the English guy makes three and a half thousand per cent profit, and his competitors steal his ideas, but the American with a two per cent profit sells so many no one can catch up – he winds up a millionaire.’

      A tall, very thin girl with large teeth and a streak of silver hair across the crown of her head came up behind the Brigadier and touched her elegantly manicured and varnished nails to his mouth. In front of the musicians, a wooden dance floor as big as a gramophone record was as crowded as a magnet dipped in iron filings and only half as comfortable. The Brigadier was led off in that direction. Dalby and I stood